Course Outline

Contents

• Course Details
• Course Summary
• Assumed Knowledge
• Learning Outcomes
• Teaching Strategies
• Student Conduct
• Assessment
• Course Schedule
• Resources for Students
• Course Evaluation and Development

Course Details

Course Summary

This is the one, true, course outline for SENG/COMP4920 in T3 2022. Anything else that you see online is lies...LIES!

In this course we will explore ethical issues for computer science, widely conceived. You will learn about ethical arguments, and how to construct and evaluate them. We will cover utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, and run test cases past collision-avoidance protocols for autonomous vehicles. You will learn to engage critically with research ethics, as well as the relationship between ethical responsibility and AI frameworks and innovation. There will be considerable discussion of "ethics washing" - the pretence of ethical reasoning by those in positions of power for the purpose of avoiding regulation, before exploring the related issues of trust, accountability, and privacy in our current online, informationalised world. We will explore equity, bias and fairness in algorithmic and dataset design, as well as the ethics of AI more broadly. We will also explore the ethical ramifications of transparency and explainability - along with their attendant relationships with power - as they relate to computer science in general. Finally, we will examine in detail the nature of ethical claims/moral judgements themselves, and how it is that our beliefs about their nature can affect our understanding of the ethical issues relating to computer science that we have examined so far.

NOTE - TUTORIALS START IN WEEK 2!!!

Assumed Knowledge

There is no assumed knowledge, but you will need a strong sense of adventure and a willingness to engage with a lot of challenging, open-ended material!lll

Learning Outcomes

After completing this course, students will be able to:

* articulate the major normative and meta-ethical theories that underpin real, research-level moral debates in both academic and professional contexts.

* define and employ ethical values, principles, and practices for responsible research and innovation of technological and computing advances.

* build, articulate, and justify their own moral arguments - as well as how to analyse moral judgements and moral arguments in general.

* be aware of the ethical issues and pitfalls in their own professional practice of developing novel technologies, including AI (e.g. fairness, transparency, accountability), and learn about existing efforts to mitigate these issues.

* openly and robustly discuss ethical dilemmas around specific technological case studies.

Teaching Strategies

• Lectures ... introduce concepts, show examples
• Tutorials ... reinforce concepts and provide additional examples - TUTORIALS START IN WEEK 2!!!!

Student Conduct

Be excellent to each other.

Be excellent to yourselves.

Also the following is wordy, but important - The Student Code of Conduct ( Information , Policy ) sets out what the University expects from students as members of the UNSW community. As well as the learning, teaching and research environment, the University aims to provide an environment that enables students to achieve their full potential and to provide an experience consistent with the University's values and guiding principles. A condition of enrolment is that students inform themselves of the University's rules and policies affecting them, and conduct themselves accordingly.

In particular, students have the responsibility to observe standards of equity and respect in dealing with every member of the University community. This applies to all activities on UNSW premises and all external activities related to study and research. This includes behaviour in person as well as behaviour on social media, for example Facebook groups set up for the purpose of discussing UNSW courses or course work. Behaviour that is considered in breach of the Student Code Policy as discriminatory, sexually inappropriate, bullying, harassing, invading another's privacy or causing any person to fear for their personal safety is serious misconduct and can lead to severe penalties, including suspension or exclusion from UNSW.

If you have any concerns, you may raise them with your lecturer, or approach the School Ethics Officer , Grievance Officer , or one of the student representatives.

Plagiarism is defined as using the words or ideas of others and presenting them as your own. UNSW and CSE treat plagiarism as academic misconduct, which means that it carries penalties as severe as being excluded from further study at UNSW. There are several on-line sources to help you understand what plagiarism is and how it is dealt with at UNSW:

• Plagiarism and Academic Integrity
• UNSW Plagiarism Procedure

Make sure that you read and understand these. Ignorance is not accepted as an excuse for plagiarism. In particular, you are also responsible that your assignment files are not accessible by anyone but you by setting the correct permissions in your CSE directory and code repository, if using. Note also that plagiarism includes paying or asking another person to do a piece of work for you and then submitting it as your own work.

UNSW has an ongoing commitment to fostering a culture of learning informed by academic integrity. All UNSW staff and students have a responsibility to adhere to this principle of academic integrity. Plagiarism undermines academic integrity and is not tolerated at UNSW. Plagiarism at UNSW is defined as using the words or ideas of others and passing them off as your own.

If you haven't done so yet, please take the time to read the full text of

• UNSW's policy regarding academic honesty and plagiarism

The pages below describe the policies and procedures in more detail:

• Student Code Policy
• Student Misconduct Procedure
• Plagiarism Policy Statement
• Plagiarism Procedure

You should also read the following page which describes your rights and responsibilities in the CSE context:

• Essential Advice for CSE Students

Auf...okay that was pretty long. Are you still reading this? Good. The next bit is about assessments and the course schedule....

Assessment

Course Schedule

Resources for Students

Please see Course Work>Lectures>Readings in the menu bar up there on the left for your weekly readings :)

Essay Questions for First Essay

Word length - 2000w in total (not including bibliography or footnotes).
Due date - Friday October 28 (Week 7), 23:59.
Please submit your essay via turnitin (details to follow).

Answer one (1) of the following questions:

1. Compare and contrast act vs rule utilitarianism. How might their use to motivate collision-avoidance protocols for autonomous vehicles result in different protocols? Which of act and rule utilitarianism do you prefer for this purpose? Why? Justify your answer.
2. Expound and assess rule-based/Kantian ethics. Analyse the extent to which such an ethics might be used to design an automated ethics . What do you think that the risks and opportunities of such an automated ethics might be? Why? Justify your answer.
3. Is kicking a robot dog morally wrong, or morally permissible? In your answer, make explicit detailed reference to virtue ethics. Which answer or answers might virtue ethics give us? Are any of these answers correct? Why? Justify your answer.
4. In his The uselessness of AI ethics (2022), Luke Munn criticises much practice in AI ethics. Do you think that Munn’s criticism is justified, and that his proposed solutions are sufficient? Why? Justify your argument with explicit detailed reference to Elettra Bietti’s From ethics washing to ethics bashing: a view on tech ethics from within moral philosophy (2020).
5. Expound cognitivism and non-cognitivism in meta-ethics. Which do you find most plausible? Why? Of the one that you find most plausible, which variety do you find most plausible? Why?

Course Evaluation and Development

This course is evaluated each session using the myExperience system.

This course has been redesigned completely. The entire content and structure, from the lectures and tutorials, to the assessments, is new for Term 3, 2022.